skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Figuring out how to post a photo to Instagram should require very little cognitive thought while working out how to do your taxes by yourself, even if the process is really well-designed and optimized can take some time and work simply because there’s a lot more variables in that case. Unless bot hare literally 100% automated, these two things are just not going to be on the same level of required effort, no matter what.

If you can't even proofread your own writing, why would anybody waste their time reading it? Blocked the site so I don't make the same mistake again.
The big deal is that it's just a hardware skin for an app while they are trying to pitch their customers on a new type of computing platform. It's just vaporware. It's a software company larping as a hardware company. They should be laughed out of existence.
Ask HN: The Problem with "AI Startups"?
Here is my current thinking:

Creating LLMs or AGI-style models requires massive compute and data, which startups are unlikely to have. Therefore, incumbents have a huge advantage when it comes to general AI. This leaves the option of using an API or similar to create a startup in a niche, but it's difficult to create a moat with such a startup, and the incumbents keep innovating and creating their own services that often make these startups obsolete.

Therefore, an "AI startup" would do best to develop domain expertise (or have a co-founder with domain expertise), create a useful product in that domain, collect data from users, and finally use the data to create a useful domain-specific narrow AI. Many software engineers want to create developer tools with AI, as this is the domain they know best. But this is precisely the domain that is most likely to be oversatured with AI tools, because AI people already tend to be developers who know about software development.

Are there some flaws in this thinking? Do you agree/disagree? I'm curious to see what HN thinks.

In particular I'm wondering what the best way to acquire this domain expertise is for a technical (CS) person, and whether it's necessary at all, or if it's better to learn as you go or find a cofounder in a non-computer domain.
This is really amazing information, I appreciate it so much!
Turns out late hegemonic capitalism has a similar failure mode to late Soviet central planning.
Hi, I'm here. I built this as an alternative to city-based Facebook groups (for people who don't use it) and in part to learn React Native.

It lets you create an artist profile, view nearby ones, match with them, then have a real-time chat with your matches.

Added a "nearby concerts" tab mainly so that the first adopters in new areas would have something useful besides a blank screen.
It was obvious from the obvious astronomical sum of money spent on the initial marketing presentation that introduced it.
IIRC, KDE was created because Motif/CDE were proprietary, but QT was free and had an open-source license, but wasn't compatible with the GPL. There was an agreement with Troltech, the creators of QT that would make QT available under a BSD-style license if they didn't release a free/open-source version after a year.

GNOME was created because of license issues with QT not being compatible with the GPL, so GNOME used GTK which was created by the GIMP project because Motif wasn't free.
But this thing is actually really efficient.

It only has an 8 kWh battery and still has a usable range of 32 km. It's efficient even for overland flight, but it can also take a much shorter path.

So, in Stockholm where we have lots of islands a trip from Bergshamra to Vaxholm is 16 km by air, 27 km by car (if you were allowed to take off from Bergshamra, which I fear one may not, since I think it's part of the airspace allocated to Bromma Airport).

This is probably better than a car, energy-use wise, at least in places where ground transport is constrained.

The limited time in hover until overheating is seriously unfun though, but I think that's solvable.
I agree with this to at extent, but will give a brief anecdote. My dad was/is a hobbyist woodworker and that's part of what he did on weekends. Typically late spring-early fall. However, 90%+ of his projects revolved around home improvement. Large decks and patios, chairs/benches for the kitchen table, playground sets, awning for the RV, redoing floors in the house, etc.

The larger projects would often span two summers. He also did not contribute to his projects on Sundays because he is religious.
Is it verbose? Yes

Will it work? Also yes.

This is usually enough for most cases. Despite HN skewing to the fancier side of programming, the vast majority of day to day programming is just slapping together API glue.

For those cases LLMs like Copilot are excellent. It's a lot faster to ask Copilot about some specific C# thing than start searching through Microsoft's documentation for it. In most cases it can just insert whatever you want at the cursor.

Like just today I pasted a SQL CREATE statement to Copilot and asked it to create a FooModel class of it. Took me 3 seconds of typing, about 5-10 seconds of waiting and clicking "insert at cursor" and I had a 15 property model class.

Repeat a few more times and I've cut down stupid tedious writing by at least 30 minutes and I can go do the more fun bits of attaching some actual logic to those models.
The attributes "old" and "established" do not describe the accuracy of a thing.

Humans believed that the earth was flat for thousands of years in various cultures - old, established, and wrong.

The geocentric model of the cosmos prevailed for about fourteen centuries until the emergence of heliocentric theories - old, established, and again, wrong.

To be clear, I'm not arguing one way or the other about the accuracy of the hypothesis you mentioned, but simply that the age and popularity of any hypothesis has little to do with whether or not it will eventually be disproven.
This is exciting!

This could really simplify a little CDN-based HNSW project I did (https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/portable-hnsw)

Seems like with duckdb vss you could just embed, store as duckdb format, then execute sql against it (in the CDN).
I don't know where this myth came from but there are many smartphones that are water resistant and with a user replaceable battery. One of the first in the mainstream was the Motorola Defy, there is also the Samsung Galaxy S5. Neither were particularly bulky. Interestingly the Galaxy S6, which followed the S5 was neither waterproof nor has a removable battery. I currently have one of the very few remaining smartphones with a removable battery (Galaxy XCover 7) and it is water resistant. It is a bit bulky (because it is rugged) but no more than the average phone when you add a case.

Sealing a battery compartment in a way that doesn't hinder replacement is a solved problem, they do it to diving watches that are actually waterproof at depth, not merely water resistant.

And phones cannot be completely sealed. That's why none are really waterproof (and warranty doesn't cover water damage). The biggest issues are speakers and microphones, getting the sound through and keeping the water out requires some compromises. Then there is the port(s), SIM tray, buttons, barometer,... By comparison, a battery cover is easy.
Bro, you are out of touch with regular people. VCs are no way indication of how regular ecomony functions. For a software engineer who lost his/her job and now struggling for months is real signal. Same with business who are one or two payments away from closing down.

BLS is government resource. Same with job reports, data gets revised often.
Silverbullet.md is another pretty good one which allows a lot of customization. I was able to recreate my (admittedly very basic) Obsidian workflow fairly quickly.
Sadly, it's not. It should be though. I know HN hates formal certification and licenses, but we really need some kind of reliable credential or signal that a candidate can program up to some very low baseline skill level. Not a signal of mastery or deep knowledge, just a very basic "this person has shown he can write a for loop and design a function with arguments and a return value." This would cut out all of the first round screens.

I've interviewed people who claimed to be practicing engineers for 5+ years, and had big name companies on their resume, but became lost when asked to write a simple (no trick question) program in a language of their choice.
Paris inaugurates giant water storage basin to clean Seine for Olympic swimming
With recent advancements in generative AI that balance is changing quickly.
"No" is not an actionable error message
Relaxing various rules on investment and m&a, and allowing unprecedented levels of market power concentration (it’s a lot worse in many major industries than what promoted our first big wave of “trust busting”) turns out to be less than awesome.
I was watching some Youtube videos to wind down last night, when it decided to play a creepy unskippable ad for a horror movie, forcing me to turn down the volume and temporarily switch to another browser tab.

As an immigrant myself, I am completely empathetic to the refugee crisis, and believe that borders are immoral. While I am completely empathetic to the cause, I am very alarmed by the possibility of ads in a VR headset. Sounds like some Black Mirror shit.
A lot of those are really a test of how well you can bullshit your way through. They probably have a fill-in-the-blanks form ready to complete with your answers, with some scoring derived from it, and your answer didn't fit in the form, so they'll pass until they find someone who can make up a good story on that particular topic.
Capitalism works perfectly if you just ignore all the inevitable disasterous consequences and outright failures.
You can’t use Obsidian for anything that makes money without buying an Enterprise license
I answer these types of questions as truthfully as possible. To my knowledge, it's never been these answers that hurt me in an interview. But, of course, there's never any real feedback in the hiring process, so it's borderline impossible to improve one's performance in that area.

When it comes to disagreements not being noteworthy, it could also be that you've internalized "disagree and commit." That's not a failing; that's just moving the fuck on and not dwelling on past decisions, unless they actually bear revisiting.
Precisely, that's the whole point.
Others have broached this, you can change your environment or you can change yourself. There is a lot of value cultivating the ability to connect to people unlike yourself, so I'm biased towards the latter.

A framing that's helpful for me sometimes is realizing that every one of us is born inevitably doomed to die. Our shared mortality and the impermanence of everything seems like a much bigger deal than small differences in perspective. Everyone's making their own progress along the same path. I think the best we can do is have compassion for ourselves and others. Whether we like it or not, we're all in this together.
Ignoring the fact that this article doesn't clearly state the "evidence" that the FTC found in this "conspiracy", it misunderstands what occurred with US Shale producers from 2010-now.

In the 2010s, US Shale Producers got hyped up on strong oil prices and the explosion of fracking. They massively overproduced, leading to the price cratering and a large majority of producers going out of business. Oil and gas was in severe distress from the late 2010s to the negative price drama in 2020.

When prices rebounded in early 2020s, there was a lot of scar tissue in the industry about overproduction. Producers are now extremely conservative. They are also well aware that clean energy is on the horizon and want to draw out this good cycle as long as they can.

Opposite to what the conspiracy theory states, OPEC and US Shale do not want prices to go too high in the short term, as this shock would accelerate the clean energy transition. They definitely want strong prices, but this $80-100 range is probably the sweet spot. Below $80, they might pull back, which is what we see from OPEC. But this certainly isn't some "conspiracy" to elevate oil to $200/barrel. These participants are sophisticated and are not that shortsighted.

I think the typical Democrat-Party view that "oil bad" and "oil corrupt" lacks nuance. It also ignores the profligate government spending that is driving excessive consumption (travel, etc.) causing a lot of these market dislocations the past several years. Now, they want to point the finger at some grand conspiracy. This seems not far off from Q-Anon on the other side of the political aisle.
How old was he?

We doubled our lifespan from 32 to 75 from 1900 to now. In a 100 years, we changed the game.

Once we pass 50, there is a lot of complex machinery at play including genetics, past history, diet, drinking, smoking e.t.c. to cause death.
I wouldn't quite rely on this article as a game changer. The author's evidence for his shocking headline is exclusively him assuming his own conclusion, and then adding a healthy helping of fudgery on top of that. From the article

---

How do you aggregate just the oil industry? Well, it’s pretty clear that in 2021 and 2022, the industry did fantastically well, with the “the top 25 companies [making] more than $205 billion in profits in 2021,” and an “even more astounding” amount in 2022. Of course, not all profits are due to price-fixing, but $205 billion is just the top 25, not the whole industry. And profits got much much better the next year.

So let’s layer on a rough guess of a $200 billion increase in profits in 2021 that Scott Sheffield implies, which is 27% of the total corporate profit increase that year. That’s a pretty astounding amount, more than a quarter of the total inflationary increase being a result purely of a price-fixing scheme.

---

So he's assuming that 100% of inflation is caused by corporate profits (which is beyond absurd), and then stating that since the oil industry made up 27% of total corporate profits (using evidence that seems to be wildly hand-wavey at best, even though the exact numbers are readily available), that they therefore caused 27% of all inflation. And somehow, the giant price-fixing conspiracy (which is a gross misrepresentation of what the FTC is saying) was the reason they made these 27% of profits (which is absurd).
Some tabs I just want to keep open indefinitely, so I'd like an option for that (maybe automatically, based on a self-defined list of domain names). But with some kind of archiving or reading list and a fully user-configurable deadline, that might work. (I'd put it the time limit at two weeks initially since I really don't mind having a few hundred tabs open, it's only after that that it starts to trouble me a bit and I lose oversight.)
Correct, you have no way to verify my claims, which is exactly my argument. Thanks!
"Grau wants more wheelchair users to come into the shop, as repairs happen much faster — only two week’s wait, on average. Wheelchair users are loath to adopt this, as coming into the office can be physically treacherous for them"

vs. a technician fixing the chair in the house.

But how about something in between? A medium-skill employee who takes the chair from their home to the repair facility? They would need to carefully document what's wrong with it, so they need a little skill but not as much as a full skill repair tech.
> a greedy biz bro simply wouldn't.

On the other hand, if it were an NSA honeypot, doing all that work would easily be worth the cost. Personally, I don't think they are, so I'm merely pointing out that there are angles other than totally above-board honest legitimate reasons, and "greedy biz bro".
> Electric cars and heat pumps.

And guess what the fossil fuel lobby is pumping millions upon millions of dollars in propaganda against.

It's been utterly nuts to watch in Germany - our local tabloid rags and their relentless campaign against heat pumps (as well as a botched communication regarding an energy-efficiency law from the government) actually worked good enough to put local manufacturers into a serious crisis [1]. Electric cars are in a similar bind - barely any government subsidies combined with falling gas prices, a lackluster / too expensive offering by everyone but Tesla and Tesla focusing more on the Cybertruck (that can't ever be certified to European standards) than on boosting Model 3 quality combined means that the % of electric cars on new registrations went downhill from 16% to 12% [2].

On top of the fossil fuel lobby spending comes heavy smear campaigning from Russia and its 5th column (aka, parts of the far left, as well as the most popular far-right party), who have identified anything "green" as a fracture point of society.

[1] https://www.mopo.de/im-norden/niedersachsen/auftragsflaute-w...

[2] https://www.adac.de/news/neuzulassungen-kba/
"smart people"
Haven't used Vampr. I made this in part because I did not enjoy the "retro" UX of BandMix and the fact that you have to pay money to send a message.
As long as you don't have private browsing windows open (these won't be restored), you should be able to close Firefox and have it restore all tabs after a restart. It will unload all tabs, i.e. they won't use memory until you focus them again.
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

I understand the reason for repeating these sentiments—it's the same reason why they get upvoted to the top of threads*—but repetition of this kind is what we're trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* I've marked this one off topic now.
This is completely understandable, but I wonder why companies don't just say this - it would be a lot better than ghosting.
Why Do I Have to Test Your Code? (The 5-Minute Sniff Test)
Reconceptualizing major depressive disorder as an infectious disease
Small correction, internet is amazing, it seems someone found how to flash it:

https://gist.github.com/Mag81/44097d9a54574a5b2ed8#file-hack...

I still resent the statement “You may unplug your Whitebox and dispose of it via your local electronic waste provider.”

So “I can’t be bothered”…
The Truth About Retro Game Hunting in a Post-Pandemic Japan
In addition to the 4th amendment, don't forget also the Privacy implications of the 1st amendment (free speech/establishment of religion are in part privacy concerns), 3rd amendment (it was a violation of privacy as much as home ownership), 5th amendment (avoidance of self-incrimination is a privacy issue), the 9th amendment (which tried to make sure that Congress and the Courts knew that the Bill of Rights wasn't the "Bill of All Rights", but the "Bill of Some Rights relevant to right this moment").

Half of the "Bill of Rights" amendments touch on Privacy in some way. Privacy can be construed as the main right defining the "Bill of Rights". I cannot understand the hypocrisy of the "originalists" (many of whom have been placed into Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, as a deliberate fraud against the voter majority under the "McConnell Plan") that believe the one single 2nd Amendment is a "right to unregulated gun ownership" when there's a "regulation clause" in the original language (!) but refuse to believe there is a "Right to Privacy" in the Bill of Rights when half of it seems so clearly about Privacy. It just doesn't use that word, perhaps because it seemed obvious at the time.
I was considering woodworking as well. However, spraying paint in public places has much lower learning curve: https://mastodon.online/@gibonov
What's the barrier to entry?
So we're back to buying fossil fuels from a third party
There exist no practical methods to prevent anonymous commentary on the internet.

If you do not accept the potential of being in a car crash, don't get in a car. If you are not accept the potential of strangers saying mean things to you on the internet, don't talk to strangers on the internet.

That is not victim blaming. It is threat modeling.

We can opine about how nice it would be to live in a world where we could keep all dangerous drivers off the road and all mean people off the internet, but we won't see major changes here for another century, so I don't advise waiting on those to live your life.
To be fair, it’s the application developer who requests the application’s permissions and it is possible to release an app without internet permission.

I agree that the OS should have a way to override the permission, but it’s not Android itself just giving out internet access by default. It’s more that it’s almost every developer’s default setting when building the app.

The best example of no internet permission in an app off the top of my head is Hacker’s Keyboard – and you can understand why the developer chose to avoid it.
Private equity discovered that regulations, compliance requirements, & other similar barriers to entry are the most effective 'moats' which allow businesses to raise prices and have little impact on demand; they are now exploiting this 'hack' ruthlessly.
Revolutionizing Test Automation with Codium AI for Open Source PHP Projects
People have lost the plot on what is hard work. I am sorry. This is absurd.
Inspired by Breaking Bad no doubt.
These aren't black markets, and they're frankly not regulation failures either. Regulatory bodies serve an important role in creating a standard people can rely on for claims that things work as medicine. They should not serve the role of making it so that people can't get their hands on things at all if the regulatory body doesn't deem them effective. If a person can see that a treatment is not FDA-approved and decides to try it anyway, the FDA's hands are clean. The failure is that if someone tries and fails to get their treatment approved, it's often more illegal to sell it than if they just claimed it worked without trying to go through the proper channels

This situation is made even worse by the Controlled Substances Act and the Analogue Act, which not only artificially restrict both supply and access to a ton of effective medications, but also create this onerous donuthole where a substance can be shown to be effective enough to warrant criminalization, but not pass the rigorous standards to be approved as medicine. It would be a lot better for everyone but enormous pharmaceutical monopolies and police states if we kept regulatory bodies' role to quality control, an official standard by which medical claims could be judged as a guide for laypeople, and fraud prevention.
Kent C. Dodds' Epic Web Conf 2024 – Watch Recordings
> Private Equity really is a pox on society.

Every single non-public business is "Private Equity". How is every single small business in the entire world "a pox on society"?

Perhaps you mean "short term thinking" is a pox on society? Or in, like in this case, a duopoly is the issue? If there were 10 such companies a reputation for slow repair would drive people to other suppliers and things would rapidly get better.
Sure but that doesn't happen. Start by doing that, not by implementing the regressive part first.
They are making bank. Thank you open Swedish data:

https://www.allabolag.se/5592384001/mullvad-vpn-ab
In my spreadsheet of possible expansions, I do have "artist", "band" and "venue" specific profiles and some way to provide value to them, but I haven't really thought it through.
That's because of the Javascript running on them. If I have a dozen youtube tabs that are not suspended my FF becomes very janky and if I look in FF task manager, sure enough, they're consuming lots of CPU. I suspend them and FF becomes snappier again.
> This textbox trim seems like a fix for badly made fonts

That's not what it is. It's a typographic control that wasn't available in browsers before. It's got nothing to do with fonts being badly made. All textboxes (no matter which font) can be measured from many different places, and this lets you specify (via text-box-edge) which of those many different places you want to consider as the bounds of a specific textbox.
Chinese startup launching $300 RISC-V laptop for devs and engineers